AI Hype Cycle: How to Find Real and Practical vs. Shiny | OpenAI’s Louis Brandy

**Louis Brandy** (0:00)
We're always gonna find ourselves attracted to some shiny thing at any given moment. Some of them are much more real than others. My big hot take on AI is that like, it's gonna get radically better at things you don't expect. Two years from now, it's gonna be shockingly good at something you did not expect it to be that good at that quickly.
But there will probably also always be ways that it's bad in ways that are surprising. Like you'll look at it and be amazing at this thing you thought it would do, but it's gonna fail in some interesting way that's maybe unexpected. So it's always gonna be this lopsided creature that's getting better in various ways.
I have a feeling there'll be a superhuman intelligence that can solve all our problems and we'll still be sitting around going, but yeah, but look how dumb it is at this thing.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:42)
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A quick note from the Dev Interrupted team. Since we recorded this episode, Rockset has been acquired by OpenAI, and Louis is now a member of OpenAI's Technical Staff. Congratulations to the whole team at Rockset on the acquisition.

**Dan Lines** (1:36)
Hey everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, LinearB COO, and today I'm joined by Louis Brandy, VP of Engineering at Rockset.
Welcome to Dev Interrupted, Louis.

**Louis Brandy** (1:51)
Thank you for having me. It's super exciting to be here.

**Dan Lines** (1:53)
Yeah, really, I think we're going to have a great conversation today. I love the topics that we have in place. We have like AI hype cycle, things around AI, a little bit about your background and that type of stuff.
What I see here is you joined Rockset, you spent more than 10 years at Meta. So before coming to Rockset, you were at 10 years at Meta, and one of the things that you were working on and built, and I think even leading an engineering team, was around Meta's AI initiatives. Could you tell us a little bit about your background and Meta and then getting to Rockset?

**Louis Brandy** (2:36)
Yeah, so I want to be careful here, because AI initiative at Meta is a very loaded term. But I was doing AI and ML stuff early on, and before it was cool. So we're talking about hype cycles, so this is kind of cool, because this is in the before time. So specifically for people who know a lot about how AI has developed in the last 10 years, this is the pre-deep learning time.
There's still a lot of that stuff. There's still a lot of classic machine learning, and there's still a lot of use cases for that kind of stuff. But I actually worked mostly on this stuff, doing a lot of proto... I don't want to call it proto AI. I mean, it was still AI, but it was different than it is now.
And we built a lot of really important systems. I mostly worked in the spam fighting and image classification kind of world. So this is actually quite relevant to what's happening right now, right as we speak.
But this was before everything broke loose, so to speak. This was before Facebook had what is known as FAIR and a lot of the other extensive and major investments into AI. But yes, I was building all of that for a long time. We built a lot of cool systems in that era, which got replaced later by much bigger, more sophisticated AI as that research kept going.

**Dan Lines** (3:48)
Yeah, that's really cool. I mean, tell us about the different stages, right? Because you were there kind of like, I don't know, you said like pre-stage a little bit early, early on. Then something shifted and now you see AI everywhere and everyone's talking about it. Can you tell us the difference between these two stages that we're in?

**Louis Brandy** (4:07)
So like my history, I even got back before Facebook. I worked in face recognition and face detection. But I've always been on the implementer, infra side more so than the research. So like my thing was always like how fast, how many frames a second can we make this thing run? How many dollars or watts does it need to run? That's kind of always been my home turf, like the infra side of it.